Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday December 03, 2008 @07:48PM
from the talk-charging dept.

alphadogg writes "It's possible that in the future conversations on your cell phone could generate enough electrical power to run the phone, without batteries.
That's one possible outcome of recent work by a team of Texas researchers, who appear to have discovered that by building a certain type of piezoelectric material to a specific thickness (about 21 nanometers, compared to a typical human hair of 100,000 nanometers), you can boost its energy production by 100 percent. And the technology could power not just phones, but a whole range of low-power mobile devices and sensors. The breakthrough is an example of 'energy harvesting' that can convert one kind of energy, such as vibrations or solar rays, into electricity."

I can imagine at some point in the future it would benefit us to produce these in massive quantities, gigantic vats 10 stories tall, thousands of incubators for these piezo powerplants.. load them up in special military aircraft and spray them far and wide.. across the great plains, the bread basket of america., absorbed into the living breathing cellulose of corn and wheat and soy beans.. through the miracle of the modern food chain all human beings would become self powering devices capable of extraordinary feats, possibly jumping tall buildings in a single leap? In the dark our eyes would glow and a vibrant radiance of glorious splendor would be self perpetuating at the local discoteks.

According to my calculations, no battery is required and this article poses an excellent solution, with a few minor modifications and innovations.

If you assume normal human speech is about 60dB. We know dB = 10 log(I/I0) where I0 is 10^-12 W/m^2. So 60dB works out to about 10^-6 W/m^2 -- that's a microwatt per square meter. With 100% efficiency and a mike of 1 cm^2 collecting area, that's around 10^-10 W -- 0.1 nano-watts. (Thanks phliar [slashdot.org] for the calculations.)

Then utilize this energy using recent advances in String Theory, and you have a workable solution.